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PTA PRESIDENT DISPOSED

DISPOSAL OF PTA PRESIDENT WHO EXPOSED FRAUD
Few parents experience the abuse that teachers experience when they try to behave in an ethical manner. Normally, putting inquisitive parents on committees and playing the public relations game with them throws them off long enough so that their child is through the system and they are no longer invested in reporting improprieties they encounter. Perhaps if defaming and humiliating parents weren't so rare, the system of silencing those who could reveal the truth about our schools would have failed long ago. More parents have the resources to sue or to spread the word about what is going on; teachers need to work and few can speak. Our administrators realize this and rarely show their evil methods to parents. However, Betsy Combier, an ethical PTA President, has the honor of being abused just as if she were a teacher! She tells you all about it below. NAPTA

When the 5 parents and Larry Lynch, Principal of MS 54, decided they had to get me to either resign my position or be attacked harshly enough for me to run away, they demanded that I set up a Special PTA meeting on June 25, 2001, a Monday, but also the last day of school!!!!!!! Almost everyone was away for the summer already. In the MS 54 Bylaws it states that if 5 parents write a request for a Special PTA meeting the PTA President must comply. So, I asked the Secretary to prepare a flyer to be sent out to all the parents notifying everyone that there would be a Special meeting. She did the flyer and brought it to the school on Friday, June 22, 2001. Larry threw the flyer in the garbage and made sure that the parents who would verbally abuse me could come to the meeting, and no one else was invited.

At this meeting I started to discuss grievances in general, as I thought this meeting was about my grievance. DJ Sheppard told me that this was NOT the purpose of the meeting, and she threw my agenda in the garbage and took out her own agenda, which listed the reading of the grievance filed against me 2 hours earlier with the School Board that I had no idea about. Then, she established the Review Committee, which everyone in the room wanted to be on (as they had been selected, and only they knew about this meeting) to remove me. One of my friends, who luckily managed to get on the Committee, ended up giving me all the information many months later, including the letters written to the NYC DOE saying that if I would not resign they would do what they had to do - hurt my children.

Back to the meeting at which the Review Committee was established: I protested that in the Bylaws it states that a Review Committee can only be set up at a General PTA meeting, so they told me that this meeting was a "Special General PTA meeting". The difference between a "Special" meeting and a " General " meeting is the notice! A "Special" PTA meeting can have a notice of 48 hours, while a "General" PTA meeting must have notices sent out at least 10 days in advance.

Then they violated the Bylaws again, by staging another "Special General PTA " meeting on November 5 in order to vote me out of office rather than have the Review Committee announce their anonymous slanderous comments at the regular PTA meeting on November 15, the meeting I was letting parents who supported me know that they should attend. The Superintendent was worried that since I was so popular with teachers and especially the black and Hispanic parents in the school, and I was speaking with them about coming to the regular meeting that I would not be voted out. Immediately before the November 5 meeting began, people standing outside the auditorium were saying, "I don't know why I'm here! I'm supposed to vote somebody off the PTA, but I don't know who? I'm not a parent at this school...my cousin in the Review Committee told me I had to come and vote."

I can prove that the notices were not sent out at all, and that I had no due process because of the 48 hour notice factor!! The unfortunate part is that everyone - the Board of Education, Commissioner Mills, the School Board, etc., is ignoring the legal liability of denying me a fair and due process. I know that if they admitted anything then they would lose their case.

As if this was not egregious enough, I filed a Verified Petition with Commissioner Mills, at the New York State Department of Education, and he hever answered it...until more than 1 year later, when I received his "decision" (which was null and void due to all the untruths in it), wherein the Commissioner said my issues were "moot" because so much time had passed. (Decision #14831 -http://www.counsel.nysed.gov/Decisions/volume42/d14831.htm).

Then, I received a contract in the mail mistakenly sent to me from the Corporation Council to a member of the Review Committee, telling her that as she had been paid and working as a full-time employee of the NYC DOE when she was working to slander and libel me, she could be defended by the Corp. Counsel with public taxpayer money.

When I sued the people on the Review Committee for saying I was a child abuser, and a liar, Supreme Court Judge Marilyn Shafer dismissed the case outright without any discovery because, she ordered, "Anyone who gets elected as a PTA President" is a public official and must expect freedom of speech and can be called anything."

This is how the System gets what "they" want. They control everything from soup to nuts. What can the victim do? Expose this process, document the perpetrators, fight and never give up. It is not an easy road on which to travel.

Betsy Combier
President, The E-Accountability Foundation
Editor, parentadvocates.org


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